Initial Design of Distributed Identification System for Geographical Origin by Trace Element Analysis

In Japan, districts where agricultural products are cultivated have recently begun to make their locality into a brand. In order to take advantage of this brand creation, some retailer and distributor camouflage agricultural products cultivated in non-branded districts to be sold as the branded districts goods with its attendant higher brand values; thus fraudulently raising their own prices. In order to prevent camouflaging of products from non-branded districts, traceability systems that mark an ID on the packaging have been proposed. However, these traceability systems cannot prevent fraud within the systems themselves, such as the use of illegally acquired IDs. Therefore, we proposed a system that distinguishes the various places of cultivation of green groceries by analyzing trace elements, which means extremely small quantities of elements, in the cultivated products and then storing this information in distributed databases. In this paper, firstly we show that discrimination is possible by correlation analysis on the results of our trace elements analysis, and we describe the outline and design of a system which identifies cultivated places of green groceries